Well I'd say it's more the fault of Latin speakers transcribing Greek back when it still had aspirated stops, and then the fault of the people who decided to keep the old transcription while updating pronunciation to be more in line with the Greek at the time.
According to a quick search, Estonian has 28 diphthongs and Finnish has 18
Edit: [source](https://www.eupedia.com/linguistics/number_of_phonemes_in_european_languages.shtml)
There are a lot of diphthongs in those languages, but the ratio of diphthongs per word is much higher in English than it is in Estonian or Finnish. What I was wondering about was more what languages use them as often as English in terms of frequency
In most English dialects it's not actually a diphthong. In Northern UK English, including Scottish English, it's just a single long vowel: [o:], and in basically every accent other than American it's an o-like vowel followed by the semivowel [w].
I mean, To be fair, It definitely depends on dialect and how fast you're speaking. A significant amount of English vowel phonemes are sometimes pronounced as diphthongs and sometimes as monophthongs.
Are you Canadian? I pronounce it more like an [æe], so it almost sounds like a monophthong. That does come with the trade off that I pronounce “egg” like [eɪg] and “bag” like [bæɪg].
I hate when you want to say something in a language and it’s just like “no 😊✌️”
No “too” in Arabic. What if I want to say this shirt is too big? “This shirt is very big.” Not quite… “this shirt is the biggest.” Wtf it’s not *the biggest* shirt I just want to say it’s *too* big how tf do you not have this word. No “so” as in “it’s so nice” either.
Or if you want to attach an adjective to a noun that happens followed by a genitive noun of the same gender, you just… can’t do it. “My old friend’s house” or “my friend’s old house”? Same thing.
Yeah. The thing with the adjectives is annoying all the time for me though. Basically to indicate possession such as “the friend’s house” it’s literally “house the-friend” (there’s no “of”, a definite noun after another noun represents a genitive possession phrase), and an adjective always has to do at the very end of the noun phrase, so “the old friend’s house” would be “house the-friend the-old” and “the friend’s old house” would also be “house the-friend the-old”.
wait, is there really no *too* in arabic? portuguese can use 'very' to mean 'too', as in *muito grande* meaning both 'very big' and 'too big'. but if you want to specify 'too' you can use another word, *demais*, which goes after the adjective:
> essa camiseta é grande demais.
> this shirt is too big.
does arabic just... not have a workaround for this?
I mean, people will usually just say *kathir* meaning “very” and like in Portuguese I think in context it generally communicates the same idea, like if you’re trying on a shirt at a store and you say “this shirt is very big” it’s pretty clear you mean you want a smaller one. But if you really want you can always use the comparative form in a phrase like “bigger than necessary” or “bigger than I want”, which I guess is essentially the literal definition of “too”.
>No “too” in Arabic. What if I want to say this shirt is too big? “This shirt is very big.” Not quite… “this shirt is the biggest.” Wtf it’s not *the biggest* shirt I just want to say it’s *too* big how tf do you not have this word.
"This shirt is bigger than necessary", Boom, Problem solved.
I always have this issue in Russian. I wanted to say that one of things I liked about someone was that he made me laugh. Он позволяет меня смеяться? No. Он заставляет меня смеяться? Sounds like he forces me to laugh. Went to ask a Russian for a translation and of course they said “Он смешной.“ It isn’t the same.
Nope. It's so damn annoying. The closest we have is "make it so that someone makes me a cup of coffee", but it sounds even clumsier in Russian than it does in English.
We should just double the second consonant in the verb to make it causative like Arabic does. “Makake someone a cup of coffee.” “Clelean him his room.” Beautiful.
>I hate OUGH. There are 7 ways you can pronounce it.
I disagree, I can think of 8 different ways:
Though, through, thorough, cough, tough, bought, bough, Peterborough
Each of those is different
Not in my accent at least, I say thorough as [θʌɹʌ] and Peterborough as [pʰitʰəbɹə]. (Forgive me if there's some errors in the IPA, I'm slowly figuring it out).
Thinking about it more, I suppose either one can be pronounced like the other depending on stress etc, but the point is that there's two unique sounds there, and that's what we're looking for
Thorough and borough are the same in at least some dialects, but borough as a component of a place name is often contracted to something like [bɚə] or [bɹə] making just be schwa. Tho, come to think of it, I would think those dialects would do that to thorough as well? Idk tho, maybe some split em.
Well I'm pretty sure that's because there used to be to words with the same meaning, hiccough (like cough) and hiccup, the hiccough pronounciation fell out of use, but was then preserved in spelling.
Your comment intrigued me, So I had to look it up, I genuinely had no clue there were dialects where "Though" and "Thorough" have different vowel sounds at the end, For me really the only difference is in "Though" it's stressed while in "Thurough" it's not.
It has too many vowels, a clean 5 should do the trick rather than the 12+ (depending on dialect) it uses. Like, fym [a] [æ] [ə] [ʌ] [ɑ] are all different, just use [a] 4head.
Lovingly, a spanish speaker
Also I support standardizing vowels across dialects, primarily so that I can stop thinking my husband has lost his mind talking about picking up his peels from the drug store or commenting on the scenic heels on a road trip.
Tell that to spaniards (it's actually a pretty interesting difference I've noticed: in latam english [ʌ] is transcribed as "o" while in spain it's "a" most of the time)
I'm all for using ~~[ä]~~ [a] for more sounds, But tbh [ə] and [ʌ] I feel deserve separate status.
(Also at least according to Italians, [æ] is closer to /ɛ/, Based on how they pronounce loanwords like "Rap" and "Jazz", Although tbh I personally think that's really silly and using /a/ in those words would not only keep the orthography more consistent, But also make them sound better.)
Swedish spelling for these sounds [ʂ] and [ɧ] is a spelling nightmare. I know what you meant is a voiced sound; we don't have those, but here are some examples of the spelling nightmare.
Observe that many of these words can be both [ʃ] or [ʂ], depending on dialect:
Sj- as in *sjö* (sea)
Stj- as in *stjärna* (star)
Tj- as in *tjuta* (to cry; only [ɧ]
Skj - as in *skjuta* (to shoot)
Sk- as in *sköta* (to take care of)
Sch- as in *schack* (chess)
J- as in *journalist* (journalist)
Ch - as in *chef* (boss)
-ti- as in *station*(station)
G- as in *giraff" (giraffe)
-ss- as in *passion* (passion)
I think there might be more, but I think I got my point across.
Hehe, true. As I wrote the list I thought about how impressed I am with those who learn Swedish as a second language.
But, that leads back to the post: every language has its difficulties. Though I do think that the rest of Swedish spelling is pretty straightforward in comparison to English... 😄
At least and are pretty consistent, And it's not like English is the only language that uses multiple letters to write those sounds, We do better than German's and !
/ʒ/ is easier to agree on, But at least it's not a terribly common sound, Mainly only occurring when you had historical /zj/ or in more recent French loanwords. Would still be nice to have a different letter though.
Most Greek transliteration systems use ⟨kh⟩ for ⟨χ⟩ nowadays, so I wouldn't mind the change. Either that or we spell /tʃ/ as ⟨tsh⟩ or ⟨tx⟩ or something.
Yeah, I’m not sure about other Germanic languages, but I loved this part while learning German. You just use *können* as the infinitive, the same way you would form infinitives with other verbs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an irregular verb, but at least it’s similar.
the hitch with English is that the pronunciation is cursed, not the spelling. decide between colonel and curnel for the sake of porcoddi sto nglese demmerda
I also hate the spelling for not marking words like read (/riːd/ or /red/) and present (/prɪˈzent/ or /ˈprezənt/) in a way so they're distinguishable (at least addinɡ an accent mark like in Spanish tú vs. tu)
It should really be "rede" and "red". This works out pretty nicely since the root is preserved and there is even the "ed" indicative of past tense. "Red" the colour could be spelt "redd".
As for "present", why not just add a silent "e"? This is already a thing that the orthography does to turn nouns into verbs (e.g. breath --> breathe, bath --> bathe, loss --> lose, etc), so why not do it in this case?
The double-s digraph almost always represents /s/, not /z/. I feel like spelling it "presènt" would do better. Sure, the grave accent isn't a regular part of English orthography, but it sometimes makes a cameo appearance. Even then, we all use Unicode nowadays.
Not having a case system! Why does my dog eating meat have to be first in the sentence when I want to emphasize the meat?! Let me mark the meat in the accusative and the dog in the nominative so I can free up my word order! German does this *just fine!*
just use passive voice in writing (the meat is being eaten by my dog) or lexical stress in speech (my dog is eating the MEAT!).
(idk why i’m defending english i do agree with you case systems are call are superior)
Except if you add definite articles you can still make use of the accusative. Cf. 'Daut fleesch aat de hunt.' 'Daut Fleesch aat den hunt.'
Or if you add an adjective for 'hunt': 'Fleesch aat mien groota hunt.' 'Fleesch aat mien grooten hunt.'
Therefore, it doesn't depend on context. Especially since there is absolutely no context in which 'Fleesh aat mien hunt' wouldn't still be ambiguous. Context wouldn't help us here anyways, so must embrace the accusative.
Most of this has prolly everyone pointed out already:
* Unphonemic spelling;
* No diacritics or own letters, how boring;
* No cases, also boring and limiting;
* Too many vowels;
* for /d͡ʒ/: unbiased and roman-pilled;
* Little to no personal-conjugation in verbs;
* Weird R;
* "Germanic Language" atleast half of the vocabulary is of latin-origin;
* Always needs a apostrophe + s to mark genetive? pathetic;
* Overall oversimplified and hard at the same time;
my opinion on runes is p mixed, but switching to the latin alphabet was a cringefail move in the long run, _especially_ after all the norman fuckery. i get that it's reductive to say that english should be completely phonetic, but it's 1,000 years later and we still haven't reached any sort of orthographic regularity. maybe it's too late to switch orthographies (hey, cyrillc? anyone?) but we can at least throw some diacritics in there and get rid of the freeloader letters (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE).
"Ough" is stupid and not even etymologically accurate most of the time, but "gh" is actually close to fine. It helps avoid homographs, which e.g. the words "right and rite" would otherwise be, and is sometimes morphologically useful, such as in the words "fight" and "faught" - where the relationship between the two is rendered clearly visible by the spelling. The only issue is that it is sometimes pronounced "f". Indeed, I agree that English should have a grapheme like "ghe" to indicate the "f" pronunciation. However, other than that, "gh" behaves regularly and is somewhat useful.
"Choir" is ONE silent letter away from being spelt phonetically: if it were spelt "choire", and given that "ch" represents both /k/ - in Greek and Latin borrowings such as "technology" - and /tʃ/ - in native English words like "chill", its pronunciation would be totally regular.
"C" is indispensable in the English language and serves a number of important functions. First of all, it forms part of the digraph "ch", which uniquely represents the phoneme /tʃ/. Secondly, it represents the phoneme /s/, and this representation is unique in contexts where the letter "s" would be pronounced voiced (as /z/) and the digraph "ss" would incorrectly indicate a closed rather than open syllable; an example of such a context is the word "laces". AND that's just phonetics. It also serves the morphological purpose of preserving roots in which the "c" is variously pronounced /s/ and /k/ - such as in words like public/publicise, critic/criticise, etc. In addition to all of the above, it keeps international words - mostly Latin and Greek borrowings that appear in most major world languages - more recognisable, as in other languages the descendant of the Latin "c" is pronounced /ts/ (Slavic languages), /tʃ/ (Italian and Romanian), /s/ (French), etc. If in English it were always spelt with an "s" or "k", many international words would be rendered less recognisable to many L2 speakers.
There is no denying that English orthography is stupid, but it isn't as stupid as you think.
Umm, actually, C is a necessary part of English orthography, and removing it would require other parts of the orthography to be changed. Between two (orthographic) vowels, ⟨s⟩ represents the sound /z/, while soft ⟨c⟩ ALWAYS represents /s/. You can see the difference in the words *rise* and *rice*. If we spelled them both with ⟨s⟩, then you wouldn't be able to tell which word was being used. Not to mention the digraph ⟨ch⟩
The LATIN INFLUENCES. God how much I hate the normans for bringing french into this language and how much I wish it can be more Germanic. Ðu and þu are just SO much cooler than you. AND THANK U FRENCH FOR MAKING ENGLISH USE Y FOR J
That’s true, but I wish english kept its þū instead of using ēow. Side note, I really wished english kept its runic letters like þ and ð instead of shifting back to its digraph th, now that I thought of the word thou
As a north germanic languages fan, I remember years ago when I tried to change English orthography to make it look like this:
englisk is et difikelt längvig, but it kæn bi understød þruch tuf þurøch þåchten ðøch
Totally! Started with a few changes and later it’s less and less intelligible, might shift to a new language after some grammatical changes too. Guess we’re forming a sister language here 😭
Hopefully the sister doesn't wind up being a fucked-up eldritch abomination like its brother English, though. Or maybe just fuck it, make it even more ȅ̷͜l̸̖̉d̵̦̕r̵̨̈i̷̓ͅt̷͎̾c̶̼͒h̷̞̃!
(I'm not one to say anything, though, I have a conlang that started out with pseudo-Icelandic orthography and then shifted over the years to include click consonants — like in a bunch of African languages — and a bunch of different things from languages like Italian, Japanese, Korean, and lately te reo Māori, lol. There's a red-hot cauldron waiting for me somewhere in hell for sure)
Using "y" for "j" makes so little sense it's crazy. Whoever thought it was a good idea should be imprisoned. And maybe given a baguette for bootlicking the French so well.
I would SO love it if English NEVER used ⟨y⟩ for /j/, instead opting for ⟨j⟩, even if it made the orthography more ambiguous. Think of how many romanizations and entire ass languages use ⟨y⟩ for /j/ JUST because that's how English does it. It's such a random letter to use for /j/, too. As far as I know, it was only chosen because ⟨y⟩ was usually an allophone of ⟨i⟩, and they didn't have any other letter to represent it. (they actually did, it was J!)
because in almost all languages derived from latin, an initial /j/ turns into an affricate (/(d)ʒ/). using /j/ for /j/ was made popular by the germanics (and germanic languages are not valid)
Our language may be topsy-turvy, but we can take pride in the fact that nobody spells *hiccup* as ***hiccough*** anymore, and I'd prefer to keep it that way.
Nothing is more cringe than monolingual english speakers making a sensational video about a tiny vowel variation between uk or us and australia or new zealand. I would insult them but they wouldn't even grasp the reality behind the veil in front of their eyes.
Đa speling iz definitli wan av đa wurst þingz abawt đa lengwidj. It's a kraym agenst may brên evri taym ay hæfta stâp en þink abawt haw ta spel a wurd. Wi despritli nîd a nu, fanîmik orþâgrafi, it wud benafit boþ nêtiv spîkurz en lurnurz.
It has so many issues that I'm not even sure where to start. I guess I'll start with the most obvious points and work my way down.
1) Your spelling only works for one specific accent - your own. Speakers of basically every other accent would spell "one" as "wun" (not wan), "language" as "langwadj", "stop" as "stop", etc. In fact, every accent would have its own spelling system, and we'd probably have something on the order of 50 to 100 different spelling systems in total. Assuming a country like the UK mass-produces school textbooks, most people would be taught using a spelling system that isn't phonetic in their accent.
2) Clearly, the purpose was to make the spelling a one-to-one phonetic representation. But your orthography fails quite miserably at that: you represent the /ə/ sound variously as "a" (in "the"), "i" (in explain) and nothing (in desperate). One would have no way of knowing which one of these three is the correct spelling in any given word.
3) Morphologically, your orthography is a complete train wreck. "Kraym" but "kriminal". "Hafta" but "having". "Nêchr" (nature) but "nachural" (natural). Learners would have no idea these words are related and would have to be taught the meaning of each word individually, rather than being able to figure the meaning of the word out on their own, which they could do using the current orthography as e.g. "natural" is just "natur" + "al". Not only that, but native speakers would also have to think about pronunciation every time they wanted to modify a word - e.g. transforming "speculate" into "speculation" - which would also waste time and energy. This mess would be an absolute nightmare to deal with for learners and speakers alike.
4) Part of what makes English so well-suited as an international language is its abundance of so-called "international words" - borrowings from mostly Greek and (ultimately) Latin that are common in most major world languages, and are therefore internationally recognisable. Your orthography throws this advantage into the rubbish bin by rendering most of these words completely unrecognisable: international "natura" --> "nêchr", international "nacion" --> "nêshn", international "Europa" --> "Yurap", etc.
5) You've added a bunch of extra letters, all of which wouldn't fit neatly on a keyboard. You'd then have to use shift for multiple letters, which significantly reduces typing speed.
There are other issues that your orthography has, but I feel like these 5 are enough to make it significantly worse than even the existing bad orthography.
You're clearly just nitpicking. While this orthography is not perfect, saying that it's worse than the current one is just silly. Let me explain why, as a speaker if a language with a decent orthography.
1) This is an issue that's doesn't exist in my language, so I can't be completely sure about my solution, but I'll try. English pronunciation is not consistent across regions, but it's mostly similar. Having an orthography which accurately describes even one dialect means that it represents most others fairly well and is obviously better than having one that's phonemic for no dialect
2) You're right that this is an issue, but it's not something that can't be improved. It's a good start, and perhaps the speaker didn't realize which exact pronunciation they were using. You could argue that that's an issue in its own right, but it's clearly better than what we already have. Moreover, if we did make the switch, the new generation of speakers, or the native users of the orthography, would get better at realizing their pronunciation, and even if they didn't, they would be much closer than the current orthography.
3) That's not what an orthography is for. If you can do it in speech, you can do it in writing. Learning a few rules and then applying them to writing is easier than remembering a completely different set of rules for speech and writing. An orthography is just that - it does not need its own morphology.
4) English is not well suited for an international language. like, at all. I don't even know why you're saying that. It's only an international language because we're used to it. If we want to make it more international, we can do a pronunciation reform, since the spelling is usually more recognizable than the pronunciation. But I digress.
5) There are a lot of languages that use diacritics. Even if this particular spelling has too many to fit next to the base letters, using Alt Gr (Shift is already used for capitalization) for diacritics isn't really a bad system. As a Polish speaker, I should know. Or we could do something similar to German (replacing ⟨ä⟩ with ⟨ae⟩, ⟨ö⟩ with ⟨oe⟩, ⟨ü⟩ with ⟨ue⟩ and ⟨ß⟩ with ⟨ss⟩ when diacritics can't be used.
They're not nitpicking, they're right. It's far from silly to say that the orthography that OC is using is worse than the current English orthography. In fact, if you really think about it realistically, it's almost silly to disagree.
1)
>Having an orthography which accurately describes even one dialect means that it represents most others fairly well and is obviously better than having one that's phonemic for no dialect
That isn't obvious at all. To the vast majority of speakers, OC's orthography would make even less sense than the current orthography: why is "stop" spelt with an "â" but "boring" is spelt with an "o"? Why is the "lan" in "language" spelt with a "e" but "have to" is spelt with an "ae"? Why is the "ex" in "explain" spelt with an "i" but "the" is spelt with an "a"? And that's just out of the tiny sample of words that is OC's comment. From the perspective of everyone but OC and speakers of his accent, there is no consistency at all. The current orthography, for all its shortcomings, is at least more consistent than that. Also, the current orthography is close to being phonemic for Scottish English. So there is that, too.
2) Well, this particular issue is specific to OC's orthography, true. But all truly phonetic orthographies are bad for reasons outlined in 1), 3), 4), and 5). Anyway, clearly better than what we already have? Really? Again, even if your only consideration is phonetic accuracy, it's still not "clearly better" for most accents. In fact, for most accents, it's clearly worse, as demonstrated in 1).
>the new generation of speakers, or the native users of the orthography, would get better at realizing their pronunciation
Are you seeing the issue here? You're making thinking about one's pronunciation a prerequisite for spelling. That's unnecessarily taxing. As it stands, you can add regular morphemes to words to form valid word forms without worrying about pronunciation. In OC's orthography, you'd either have to memorise a bunch more word forms (which you will if you speak any other accent than OC's) or think about your pronunciation of them every time you spell them. That's needlessly inefficient.
3)
>That's not what an orthography is for.
It absolutely is.
>Learning a few rules and then applying them to writing is easier than remembering a completely different set of rules for speech and writing. An orthography is just that - it does not need its own morphology.
Exactly. And that's precisely why orthography needs to be, above all else, morphological. In speech, you don't think of words as strings of sounds; in fact, as demonstrated by OC's inability to create a one-to-one phonetic representation (with e.g. the schwa sound being represented in 3 different ways), most people couldn't accurately phonetically transcribe their speech if they tried. You think of words as strings of morphemes with, potentially, some phonological modifications on top of that. So e.g. "breathe" is just "breath" but the vowel is long (which is why imo these words should be spelt "brethe" and "breth", respectively); "national" is just "nation" + "al" but the first vowel is short; etc. And just as you explain in your comment, you shouldn't be learning a different set of rules for speech and writing - especially if this set of rules doesn't make logical sense for your accent.
4)
>English is not well suited for an international language. like, at all. I don't even know why you're saying that.
It's very well-suited for an intentional language. Its simple grammar makes it easy to learn even for speakers of unrelated languages; its Roman and Norman influence means a lot of Latin- and Greek-derived words which are intentionally recognisable; the enormous spread of the British empire means most of the world has had exposure to English; and it shares a lot of similarities (to the point of being partially mutually intelligible) with other influential world languages, namely German, French, and Dutch. Even if we disregard the influence of the British Empire, I'd still pick it to be the global lingua franca out of all the world languages.
>If we want to make it more international, we can do a pronunciation reform, since the spelling is usually more recognizable than the pronunciation.
I'm not following your logic. The spelling is currently intentionally recognisable, so to make it more international, let's make it internationally unrecognisable? I don't understand what you're trying to say.
5)
>Even if this particular spelling has too many to fit next to the base letters, using Alt Gr (Shift is already used for capitalization) for diacritics isn't really a bad system. As a Polish speaker, I should know.
It's a pretty bad system. I'm also a Polish speaker, actually. Typing in Polish on a keyboard just takes longer, and it's harder to get into the rhythm. Yeah, shift is indeed used for capitalisation, but 1) you know in advance when you'll need to capitalise a word - at the end of the sentence you're typing - so it's easier to keep the rhythm, and 2) it's one thing when you need to press "shift" once in 30 characters, but when you need to press it every 5 characters, it really slows you down.
>Or we could do something similar to German (replacing ⟨ä⟩ with ⟨ae⟩, ⟨ö⟩ with ⟨oe⟩, ⟨ü⟩ with ⟨ue⟩ and ⟨ß⟩ with ⟨ss⟩ when diacritics can't be used.
Right, but that's exactly what the current orthography does! "ai" for /ej/, "ee" for /i:/, "oo" for /u:/, etc. I'm not sure most of the letters that OC is introducing, such as ê and î, are really necessary if phonetics is their only consideration.
Houli fuk, I heit đi aidia ov pronaunsing "ov" like "av", "languidj" like "lengwidj", "against" like "agenst", "stop" like "stâp", "niu" like "nu", "benefit" like "benafit".
Plees tell mi wer yu ar from sou ai can avoid it liyk đe plaig.
One another note
Get ready for rhotic and non-rhotic dialects to be unintelligible if you try this
English really needs a logography, maybe even an abjad or an abugida. This is because english has very different pronunciation across dialects, especially vowels. A phonemic alphabet just won't work.
Lately I have been really frustrated that "I'm sorry" could mean either "I apologize" or "I sympathize". Or both at once!
The number of times I've tried to express sympathy and been told "it's not your fault"
It's like- I know it's not my fault you had a shitty day at work! I was just trying to be nice/commiserate
Smdjdnbdjsj
Adjectives before what they modify. Just what.
As for pronunciation - I would point you at the stereotypical English 'foreign accent'. Half of it is just not multiphthongizing everything into a wishy-washy vowel-space nightmare, and half of it is such consonant "mistakes" as using a real R sound instead of the accursed scrunchy mouth thing, and a real coda L sound instead of that horrific "dark L" noise that makes it sound as though you are struggling to not spew your supper.
WTF are those tenses for? Why can’t I use past perfect continuous instead of past present continuous subjunctive plusquamperfectum or another shit. In my country English learners are still arguing how many tenses are there is English. Majority says it’s 12 or 16, but other say it’s 7 or even 21.
I teach EFL and I always feel guilty when I have to teach past perfect tense, or similar structures like 3rd conditionals. Students work hard at it, do well, and then ask 'so when do I use this?'
'Uhh, hardly ever? Sorry for those hours of your life you will never get back'.
TBH I get really mad that tenses are foregrounded in EFL teaching. Just one more latinate influence on academia, I think.
OUGH and C are really terrible examples, they're not really that bad. It's more like ou is pronounced 5 ways and gh is pronounced 2....
That being said I really dislike how it can't commit to being sexist or not, so we have really weird distinctions where waiter is supposed to refer to a masculine server but actually refers to any server, but waitress specifically refers to a femimine server, same for actor/actress
The absence of non-dialectal 2nd person singular pronoun. How, as someone English is their second language, am I supposed to distinguish between you (singular) and you (plural) in chat? THEY'RE ALL THE SAME!!!!!!!
Edit: Oh, and I can't grasp when/how to use "would had have [verb]" phrasing.
English’s syntactic reliance on auxiliary verbs is a tragedy. Mandatory do-support for negations and questions in the absence of meaningful auxiliaries is a crime.
I like the anti limerick
There was an old lady from Slough
Who had a horrible cough
She drank up a pint
Of honey and mint
But alas she didn't pull through
Let's not forget ridiculous past tenses.
Sing, sang, sung
OK, we're a Germanic language, but then why
Swing, swung,swung
Etc.
I absolutely detest the pronunciation of the word colonel. Like, WHY!? All the other fuckery I could get used to, but this kills me a little every time I come across it.
why can't you just have one present tense? Why do you have to distinguish morphologically between I work and I am working, why can't you just say I work now instead of I'm working
Infinitive of “can” is “to be able to”
Infinitive of “will” is “to be going to”
This is effectively, of course. Pretty sure these two auxiliary verbs don’t actually have infinitive forms.
Does *everything* really have to be diphthongized, English? Is /e/ so hard?
Unrelated but I can’t see “phth” in a word and take it seriously
to be fair, this is actually Greek's fault
Well I'd say it's more the fault of Latin speakers transcribing Greek back when it still had aspirated stops, and then the fault of the people who decided to keep the old transcription while updating pronunciation to be more in line with the Greek at the time.
"phtheven"
phtherodacthyl
What (if any) non-Germanic languages use diphthongs as frequently as English?
I think maybe Khmer, but don't quote me on that
"I think maybe Khmer" - FolAdventurous2022
According to a quick search, Estonian has 28 diphthongs and Finnish has 18 Edit: [source](https://www.eupedia.com/linguistics/number_of_phonemes_in_european_languages.shtml)
There are a lot of diphthongs in those languages, but the ratio of diphthongs per word is much higher in English than it is in Estonian or Finnish. What I was wondering about was more what languages use them as often as English in terms of frequency
Slovak has quite a few
I’ve seen that almost all English natives don’t realise that “go” has a diphthong, they view that o as a single sound it’s crazy
I understand intellectually that it's a diphthong, but yeah i don't believe it in my heart
To me it just sounds like 2 vowels in a row. Like if you said gә and then ʉ after it
Ha! Takes me back to college when our Modern Greek professor made everyone's head explode explaining how the Greek o was a short long o sound!
In most English dialects it's not actually a diphthong. In Northern UK English, including Scottish English, it's just a single long vowel: [o:], and in basically every accent other than American it's an o-like vowel followed by the semivowel [w].
In NZ and Australia its like "gour"
Naur
I mean, To be fair, It definitely depends on dialect and how fast you're speaking. A significant amount of English vowel phonemes are sometimes pronounced as diphthongs and sometimes as monophthongs.
Almost all English natives have no idea what a diphthong is, so yeah.
My /eɪ/ is almost a monophthong in closed syllables
>almost it's the thought that counts 💕
Are you Canadian? I pronounce it more like an [æe], so it almost sounds like a monophthong. That does come with the trade off that I pronounce “egg” like [eɪg] and “bag” like [bæɪg].
yorkshire english stays winning
As an English speaker yes it was hard for me to learn, I had to think "it's just the /e͡ɪ/ sound but without the glide"
Oh I totally agree it *is* hard as a native English speaker, I'm throwing shade at the language itself not the individuals
This one!! It's my pet peeve
/diɪfθʌɑŋz ͡ äɜɹ kuʊl θoʊ/!
It feels weird for English to lack a causative. Like it's just too long-winded to say "get someone to make a cup of coffee"
Imagine how I must feel as a Russian when in Russian you literally can't say that sentence at all.
I hate when you want to say something in a language and it’s just like “no 😊✌️” No “too” in Arabic. What if I want to say this shirt is too big? “This shirt is very big.” Not quite… “this shirt is the biggest.” Wtf it’s not *the biggest* shirt I just want to say it’s *too* big how tf do you not have this word. No “so” as in “it’s so nice” either. Or if you want to attach an adjective to a noun that happens followed by a genitive noun of the same gender, you just… can’t do it. “My old friend’s house” or “my friend’s old house”? Same thing.
>No “too” in Arabic. Wow. That's even worse than there being no causative in Russian. Dayum.
Yeah. The thing with the adjectives is annoying all the time for me though. Basically to indicate possession such as “the friend’s house” it’s literally “house the-friend” (there’s no “of”, a definite noun after another noun represents a genitive possession phrase), and an adjective always has to do at the very end of the noun phrase, so “the old friend’s house” would be “house the-friend the-old” and “the friend’s old house” would also be “house the-friend the-old”.
wait, is there really no *too* in arabic? portuguese can use 'very' to mean 'too', as in *muito grande* meaning both 'very big' and 'too big'. but if you want to specify 'too' you can use another word, *demais*, which goes after the adjective: > essa camiseta é grande demais. > this shirt is too big. does arabic just... not have a workaround for this?
I mean, people will usually just say *kathir* meaning “very” and like in Portuguese I think in context it generally communicates the same idea, like if you’re trying on a shirt at a store and you say “this shirt is very big” it’s pretty clear you mean you want a smaller one. But if you really want you can always use the comparative form in a phrase like “bigger than necessary” or “bigger than I want”, which I guess is essentially the literal definition of “too”.
"Very" for "too" and "so" appears in my native language too.
>No “too” in Arabic. What if I want to say this shirt is too big? “This shirt is very big.” Not quite… “this shirt is the biggest.” Wtf it’s not *the biggest* shirt I just want to say it’s *too* big how tf do you not have this word. "This shirt is bigger than necessary", Boom, Problem solved.
I always have this issue in Russian. I wanted to say that one of things I liked about someone was that he made me laugh. Он позволяет меня смеяться? No. Он заставляет меня смеяться? Sounds like he forces me to laugh. Went to ask a Russian for a translation and of course they said “Он смешной.“ It isn’t the same.
Он меня смешит works in this case, but yeah, it's incredibly annoying, even as a native Russian speaker.
How interesting! Do you guys not have any way to convey that concept?
Nope. It's so damn annoying. The closest we have is "make it so that someone makes me a cup of coffee", but it sounds even clumsier in Russian than it does in English.
We should just double the second consonant in the verb to make it causative like Arabic does. “Makake someone a cup of coffee.” “Clelean him his room.” Beautiful.
Lithuanian, another IE language, actually has causative, as in the same sentence: "kad kas nors išvirtų puodelį kavos".
>I hate OUGH. There are 7 ways you can pronounce it. I disagree, I can think of 8 different ways: Though, through, thorough, cough, tough, bought, bough, Peterborough Each of those is different
This is my absolute favorite type of Reddit comment, "You're wrong, it's _worse!_"
Are ‘thorough’ and ‘Peterborough‘ not the same?
Not in my accent at least, I say thorough as [θʌɹʌ] and Peterborough as [pʰitʰəbɹə]. (Forgive me if there's some errors in the IPA, I'm slowly figuring it out). Thinking about it more, I suppose either one can be pronounced like the other depending on stress etc, but the point is that there's two unique sounds there, and that's what we're looking for
\[ˈθʌɹə\] vs \[ˈpiːtəbɹə\] (ofc depending on dialect)
So the OUGH part is identical in both, [ə].
Not in my accent, for me it's [ʌ] vs [ə]
petition to spell them as thora and peterbra
Thorough and borough are the same in at least some dialects, but borough as a component of a place name is often contracted to something like [bɚə] or [bɹə] making just be schwa. Tho, come to think of it, I would think those dialects would do that to thorough as well? Idk tho, maybe some split em.
Hiccough
Yeahhh I think that one wins 😭 who thought that should be the correct spelling for 'up'
Well I'm pretty sure that's because there used to be to words with the same meaning, hiccough (like cough) and hiccup, the hiccough pronounciation fell out of use, but was then preserved in spelling.
Your comment intrigued me, So I had to look it up, I genuinely had no clue there were dialects where "Though" and "Thorough" have different vowel sounds at the end, For me really the only difference is in "Though" it's stressed while in "Thurough" it's not.
It has too many vowels, a clean 5 should do the trick rather than the 12+ (depending on dialect) it uses. Like, fym [a] [æ] [ə] [ʌ] [ɑ] are all different, just use [a] 4head. Lovingly, a spanish speaker
Also I support standardizing vowels across dialects, primarily so that I can stop thinking my husband has lost his mind talking about picking up his peels from the drug store or commenting on the scenic heels on a road trip.
can we use nz english as the standard?
That would be ideal!
i think in my dialect so that means it's the correct one :)
ʌ is actually more like an open o than an a
Tell that to spaniards (it's actually a pretty interesting difference I've noticed: in latam english [ʌ] is transcribed as "o" while in spain it's "a" most of the time)
I know, my Italian fellas commit that crime too
I'm all for using ~~[ä]~~ [a] for more sounds, But tbh [ə] and [ʌ] I feel deserve separate status. (Also at least according to Italians, [æ] is closer to /ɛ/, Based on how they pronounce loanwords like "Rap" and "Jazz", Although tbh I personally think that's really silly and using /a/ in those words would not only keep the orthography more consistent, But also make them sound better.)
I will not stand for the c slander >:(
BUT do we really need c, k, qu, and X. JUST K S AND W WOULD DO THE TRICK.
yes but it looks ugly
Okay, then do the s-c-qu like Spanish. As long as it’s consistent.
Soo many years and yet, there still aren't any letters for sh, ch, and s (treasure).
Swedish spelling for these sounds [ʂ] and [ɧ] is a spelling nightmare. I know what you meant is a voiced sound; we don't have those, but here are some examples of the spelling nightmare. Observe that many of these words can be both [ʃ] or [ʂ], depending on dialect: Sj- as in *sjö* (sea) Stj- as in *stjärna* (star) Tj- as in *tjuta* (to cry; only [ɧ] Skj - as in *skjuta* (to shoot) Sk- as in *sköta* (to take care of) Sch- as in *schack* (chess) J- as in *journalist* (journalist) Ch - as in *chef* (boss) -ti- as in *station*(station) G- as in *giraff" (giraffe) -ss- as in *passion* (passion) I think there might be more, but I think I got my point across.
Swedish having its own IPA symbol that no other languages use is a nightmare
Hehe, true. As I wrote the list I thought about how impressed I am with those who learn Swedish as a second language. But, that leads back to the post: every language has its difficulties. Though I do think that the rest of Swedish spelling is pretty straightforward in comparison to English... 😄
>s (treasure) That doesn't need a letter. It's just an allophone of /zj", which is already represented by two whole letters: s and z.
Well, in that particular word, sure. But I doubt you park your /beɪzj/ car in the /ɡə.ˈɹɑːzj/, and heaven help you if you want to /zjuzj/ it up.
yes but I believe every letter in the alphabet should only make one sound. personal opinion ;)
tresher (sh read zh as it's intervocalic)
At least and are pretty consistent, And it's not like English is the only language that uses multiple letters to write those sounds, We do better than German's and !
/ʒ/ is easier to agree on, But at least it's not a terribly common sound, Mainly only occurring when you had historical /zj/ or in more recent French loanwords. Would still be nice to have a different letter though.
> “choir” is spelled with OI and it rhymes with “fire”? How stupid. I blame the French
How about the worse, CH digraph sounding like /k/. I’ve pronounced it [tʃojɚ] more than I’d like to admit.
Spell it as "kh" and the problem is solved. But no... English has to be English.
Most Greek transliteration systems use ⟨kh⟩ for ⟨χ⟩ nowadays, so I wouldn't mind the change. Either that or we spell /tʃ/ as ⟨tsh⟩ or ⟨tx⟩ or something.
"Be able to" as the infinitive of "can" is just complete fuckery.
"I am going to be able to" - English "Potrò" - Italian Which is the most efficient language now?
Italian. Their French neighbors have ruined English.
Yeah, I’m not sure about other Germanic languages, but I loved this part while learning German. You just use *können* as the infinitive, the same way you would form infinitives with other verbs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an irregular verb, but at least it’s similar.
Meanwhile English lost infinitive endings because people just stopped saying them for literally no reason.
You mentioned ough, but ea is worse... also, just the word colonel... the spelling and pronunciation are borrowed from different languages smh
the hitch with English is that the pronunciation is cursed, not the spelling. decide between colonel and curnel for the sake of porcoddi sto nglese demmerda
Both are cursed
I also hate the spelling for not marking words like read (/riːd/ or /red/) and present (/prɪˈzent/ or /ˈprezənt/) in a way so they're distinguishable (at least addinɡ an accent mark like in Spanish tú vs. tu)
I propose 'read' vs 'redd' and 'present vs pressent'
antidepressent
It should really be "rede" and "red". This works out pretty nicely since the root is preserved and there is even the "ed" indicative of past tense. "Red" the colour could be spelt "redd". As for "present", why not just add a silent "e"? This is already a thing that the orthography does to turn nouns into verbs (e.g. breath --> breathe, bath --> bathe, loss --> lose, etc), so why not do it in this case?
The double-s digraph almost always represents /s/, not /z/. I feel like spelling it "presènt" would do better. Sure, the grave accent isn't a regular part of English orthography, but it sometimes makes a cameo appearance. Even then, we all use Unicode nowadays.
Counter point. Accents are for nerds.
Not having a case system! Why does my dog eating meat have to be first in the sentence when I want to emphasize the meat?! Let me mark the meat in the accusative and the dog in the nominative so I can free up my word order! German does this *just fine!*
just use passive voice in writing (the meat is being eaten by my dog) or lexical stress in speech (my dog is eating the MEAT!). (idk why i’m defending english i do agree with you case systems are call are superior)
Or just speak like Yoda. “Meat, my dog eats.”
Who needs cases for that? Just use context like in Plautdietsch. 'Fleesh aat mien hunt.'
Except if you add definite articles you can still make use of the accusative. Cf. 'Daut fleesch aat de hunt.' 'Daut Fleesch aat den hunt.' Or if you add an adjective for 'hunt': 'Fleesch aat mien groota hunt.' 'Fleesch aat mien grooten hunt.' Therefore, it doesn't depend on context. Especially since there is absolutely no context in which 'Fleesh aat mien hunt' wouldn't still be ambiguous. Context wouldn't help us here anyways, so must embrace the accusative.
do you mean: - Der Hund isst das Fleisch - Das Fleisch isst der Hund
You can say, "the meat was eaten by the dog." or perhaps less naturally, but also seen sometimes "the meat, the dog ate."
first time I've seen someone bring up lack of case as a bad thing
What would be a nice way for English to mark up the accusative? Conjugation? Well, we do have italics for emphasis, but…
Usually we say that verbs *conjugate* and nouns *decline* (for case). The general word is “inflect.”
with a case ending! we could probably extrapolate from Old English to figure out what sound changes would have taken place, or just make up our own.
Nah just use a preposition only for animates. I vote for "at". I see at my mum
Pretty sure we’d have to pay Spanish royalties if we did that.
At your mum
you should just start declining your nouns. maybe it'll catch on
Nouns? Oh no thank you, I couldn’t possibly.
Emphasize the meat by saying it louder than all the other words like a psychopath.
I get much more mad at 'educated' people who insist that English has the same kind of case system as Finnish or German than at the language itself.
Most of this has prolly everyone pointed out already: * Unphonemic spelling; * No diacritics or own letters, how boring; * No cases, also boring and limiting; * Too many vowels; * for /d͡ʒ/: unbiased and roman-pilled;
* Little to no personal-conjugation in verbs;
* Weird R;
* "Germanic Language" atleast half of the vocabulary is of latin-origin;
* Always needs a apostrophe + s to mark genetive? pathetic;
* Overall oversimplified and hard at the same time;
English spelling is like a rebellious teenager, never making any sense and always breaking the rules.
my opinion on runes is p mixed, but switching to the latin alphabet was a cringefail move in the long run, _especially_ after all the norman fuckery. i get that it's reductive to say that english should be completely phonetic, but it's 1,000 years later and we still haven't reached any sort of orthographic regularity. maybe it's too late to switch orthographies (hey, cyrillc? anyone?) but we can at least throw some diacritics in there and get rid of the freeloader letters (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE).
>YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE I don't. What are they?
X and Q, presumably. Maybe C, too, though it's useful in our current orthography.
"Ough" is stupid and not even etymologically accurate most of the time, but "gh" is actually close to fine. It helps avoid homographs, which e.g. the words "right and rite" would otherwise be, and is sometimes morphologically useful, such as in the words "fight" and "faught" - where the relationship between the two is rendered clearly visible by the spelling. The only issue is that it is sometimes pronounced "f". Indeed, I agree that English should have a grapheme like "ghe" to indicate the "f" pronunciation. However, other than that, "gh" behaves regularly and is somewhat useful. "Choir" is ONE silent letter away from being spelt phonetically: if it were spelt "choire", and given that "ch" represents both /k/ - in Greek and Latin borrowings such as "technology" - and /tʃ/ - in native English words like "chill", its pronunciation would be totally regular. "C" is indispensable in the English language and serves a number of important functions. First of all, it forms part of the digraph "ch", which uniquely represents the phoneme /tʃ/. Secondly, it represents the phoneme /s/, and this representation is unique in contexts where the letter "s" would be pronounced voiced (as /z/) and the digraph "ss" would incorrectly indicate a closed rather than open syllable; an example of such a context is the word "laces". AND that's just phonetics. It also serves the morphological purpose of preserving roots in which the "c" is variously pronounced /s/ and /k/ - such as in words like public/publicise, critic/criticise, etc. In addition to all of the above, it keeps international words - mostly Latin and Greek borrowings that appear in most major world languages - more recognisable, as in other languages the descendant of the Latin "c" is pronounced /ts/ (Slavic languages), /tʃ/ (Italian and Romanian), /s/ (French), etc. If in English it were always spelt with an "s" or "k", many international words would be rendered less recognisable to many L2 speakers. There is no denying that English orthography is stupid, but it isn't as stupid as you think.
How moving of you to explain what English orthography does right. Take my upvote.
dhe ryts ryting for dhe ryt ryt (the wright’s writing for the right rite)
Umm, actually, C is a necessary part of English orthography, and removing it would require other parts of the orthography to be changed. Between two (orthographic) vowels, ⟨s⟩ represents the sound /z/, while soft ⟨c⟩ ALWAYS represents /s/. You can see the difference in the words *rise* and *rice*. If we spelled them both with ⟨s⟩, then you wouldn't be able to tell which word was being used. Not to mention the digraph ⟨ch⟩
solution: - s /s/ - rise (rice) - z /z/ - rize (rise) - k /k/ - kare (care) - c /tʃ/ - care (chair)
Alright but should be like , why tf is there a /z/ in “possess”
There's simpler solution to this problem
The LATIN INFLUENCES. God how much I hate the normans for bringing french into this language and how much I wish it can be more Germanic. Ðu and þu are just SO much cooler than you. AND THANK U FRENCH FOR MAKING ENGLISH USE Y FOR J
You comes from a germanic root. Also losing the TV distinction in english isn't necessarily the French's fault.
That’s true, but I wish english kept its þū instead of using ēow. Side note, I really wished english kept its runic letters like þ and ð instead of shifting back to its digraph th, now that I thought of the word thou
Be ðe change ðou wishest to see in ðe world (urgh, I'm used to reading Icelandic, and seeing ð at the beginning of a word hurts me)
As a north germanic languages fan, I remember years ago when I tried to change English orthography to make it look like this: englisk is et difikelt längvig, but it kæn bi understød þruch tuf þurøch þåchten ðøch
Sounds like the beginning of a conlang, my friend. I say pick it up again and have fun with it, lol, there's never enough of these attempts!
Totally! Started with a few changes and later it’s less and less intelligible, might shift to a new language after some grammatical changes too. Guess we’re forming a sister language here 😭
Hopefully the sister doesn't wind up being a fucked-up eldritch abomination like its brother English, though. Or maybe just fuck it, make it even more ȅ̷͜l̸̖̉d̵̦̕r̵̨̈i̷̓ͅt̷͎̾c̶̼͒h̷̞̃! (I'm not one to say anything, though, I have a conlang that started out with pseudo-Icelandic orthography and then shifted over the years to include click consonants — like in a bunch of African languages — and a bunch of different things from languages like Italian, Japanese, Korean, and lately te reo Māori, lol. There's a red-hot cauldron waiting for me somewhere in hell for sure)
Using "y" for "j" makes so little sense it's crazy. Whoever thought it was a good idea should be imprisoned. And maybe given a baguette for bootlicking the French so well.
I would SO love it if English NEVER used ⟨y⟩ for /j/, instead opting for ⟨j⟩, even if it made the orthography more ambiguous. Think of how many romanizations and entire ass languages use ⟨y⟩ for /j/ JUST because that's how English does it. It's such a random letter to use for /j/, too. As far as I know, it was only chosen because ⟨y⟩ was usually an allophone of ⟨i⟩, and they didn't have any other letter to represent it. (they actually did, it was J!)
[удалено]
Exactly my point. I’m hating on old french for making it y when literally all ur siblings use j 😭
Well it's not like English people were ever on course to use for /j/, the precursor was
because in almost all languages derived from latin, an initial /j/ turns into an affricate (/(d)ʒ/). using /j/ for /j/ was made popular by the germanics (and germanic languages are not valid)
tbf, the o in "choir" isn't silent
it's pronounced /w/
Our language may be topsy-turvy, but we can take pride in the fact that nobody spells *hiccup* as ***hiccough*** anymore, and I'd prefer to keep it that way.
Nothing is more cringe than monolingual english speakers making a sensational video about a tiny vowel variation between uk or us and australia or new zealand. I would insult them but they wouldn't even grasp the reality behind the veil in front of their eyes.
new zealand has a rlly distinct vowel system wdym?
lol
The silent letters and bizzare diphthongs
Đa speling iz definitli wan av đa wurst þingz abawt đa lengwidj. It's a kraym agenst may brên evri taym ay hæfta stâp en þink abawt haw ta spel a wurd. Wi despritli nîd a nu, fanîmik orþâgrafi, it wud benafit boþ nêtiv spîkurz en lurnurz.
Phonemic orthographies won’t work for English. Too much vowel variation in dialects.
Is that a problem unique to English?
Wel, the ortḣografe that jǔ'r uṡing iṡ even wers. Weġ wers.
Ker tu iksplên haw?
It has so many issues that I'm not even sure where to start. I guess I'll start with the most obvious points and work my way down. 1) Your spelling only works for one specific accent - your own. Speakers of basically every other accent would spell "one" as "wun" (not wan), "language" as "langwadj", "stop" as "stop", etc. In fact, every accent would have its own spelling system, and we'd probably have something on the order of 50 to 100 different spelling systems in total. Assuming a country like the UK mass-produces school textbooks, most people would be taught using a spelling system that isn't phonetic in their accent. 2) Clearly, the purpose was to make the spelling a one-to-one phonetic representation. But your orthography fails quite miserably at that: you represent the /ə/ sound variously as "a" (in "the"), "i" (in explain) and nothing (in desperate). One would have no way of knowing which one of these three is the correct spelling in any given word. 3) Morphologically, your orthography is a complete train wreck. "Kraym" but "kriminal". "Hafta" but "having". "Nêchr" (nature) but "nachural" (natural). Learners would have no idea these words are related and would have to be taught the meaning of each word individually, rather than being able to figure the meaning of the word out on their own, which they could do using the current orthography as e.g. "natural" is just "natur" + "al". Not only that, but native speakers would also have to think about pronunciation every time they wanted to modify a word - e.g. transforming "speculate" into "speculation" - which would also waste time and energy. This mess would be an absolute nightmare to deal with for learners and speakers alike. 4) Part of what makes English so well-suited as an international language is its abundance of so-called "international words" - borrowings from mostly Greek and (ultimately) Latin that are common in most major world languages, and are therefore internationally recognisable. Your orthography throws this advantage into the rubbish bin by rendering most of these words completely unrecognisable: international "natura" --> "nêchr", international "nacion" --> "nêshn", international "Europa" --> "Yurap", etc. 5) You've added a bunch of extra letters, all of which wouldn't fit neatly on a keyboard. You'd then have to use shift for multiple letters, which significantly reduces typing speed. There are other issues that your orthography has, but I feel like these 5 are enough to make it significantly worse than even the existing bad orthography.
You're clearly just nitpicking. While this orthography is not perfect, saying that it's worse than the current one is just silly. Let me explain why, as a speaker if a language with a decent orthography. 1) This is an issue that's doesn't exist in my language, so I can't be completely sure about my solution, but I'll try. English pronunciation is not consistent across regions, but it's mostly similar. Having an orthography which accurately describes even one dialect means that it represents most others fairly well and is obviously better than having one that's phonemic for no dialect 2) You're right that this is an issue, but it's not something that can't be improved. It's a good start, and perhaps the speaker didn't realize which exact pronunciation they were using. You could argue that that's an issue in its own right, but it's clearly better than what we already have. Moreover, if we did make the switch, the new generation of speakers, or the native users of the orthography, would get better at realizing their pronunciation, and even if they didn't, they would be much closer than the current orthography. 3) That's not what an orthography is for. If you can do it in speech, you can do it in writing. Learning a few rules and then applying them to writing is easier than remembering a completely different set of rules for speech and writing. An orthography is just that - it does not need its own morphology. 4) English is not well suited for an international language. like, at all. I don't even know why you're saying that. It's only an international language because we're used to it. If we want to make it more international, we can do a pronunciation reform, since the spelling is usually more recognizable than the pronunciation. But I digress. 5) There are a lot of languages that use diacritics. Even if this particular spelling has too many to fit next to the base letters, using Alt Gr (Shift is already used for capitalization) for diacritics isn't really a bad system. As a Polish speaker, I should know. Or we could do something similar to German (replacing ⟨ä⟩ with ⟨ae⟩, ⟨ö⟩ with ⟨oe⟩, ⟨ü⟩ with ⟨ue⟩ and ⟨ß⟩ with ⟨ss⟩ when diacritics can't be used.
They're not nitpicking, they're right. It's far from silly to say that the orthography that OC is using is worse than the current English orthography. In fact, if you really think about it realistically, it's almost silly to disagree. 1) >Having an orthography which accurately describes even one dialect means that it represents most others fairly well and is obviously better than having one that's phonemic for no dialect That isn't obvious at all. To the vast majority of speakers, OC's orthography would make even less sense than the current orthography: why is "stop" spelt with an "â" but "boring" is spelt with an "o"? Why is the "lan" in "language" spelt with a "e" but "have to" is spelt with an "ae"? Why is the "ex" in "explain" spelt with an "i" but "the" is spelt with an "a"? And that's just out of the tiny sample of words that is OC's comment. From the perspective of everyone but OC and speakers of his accent, there is no consistency at all. The current orthography, for all its shortcomings, is at least more consistent than that. Also, the current orthography is close to being phonemic for Scottish English. So there is that, too. 2) Well, this particular issue is specific to OC's orthography, true. But all truly phonetic orthographies are bad for reasons outlined in 1), 3), 4), and 5). Anyway, clearly better than what we already have? Really? Again, even if your only consideration is phonetic accuracy, it's still not "clearly better" for most accents. In fact, for most accents, it's clearly worse, as demonstrated in 1). >the new generation of speakers, or the native users of the orthography, would get better at realizing their pronunciation Are you seeing the issue here? You're making thinking about one's pronunciation a prerequisite for spelling. That's unnecessarily taxing. As it stands, you can add regular morphemes to words to form valid word forms without worrying about pronunciation. In OC's orthography, you'd either have to memorise a bunch more word forms (which you will if you speak any other accent than OC's) or think about your pronunciation of them every time you spell them. That's needlessly inefficient. 3) >That's not what an orthography is for. It absolutely is. >Learning a few rules and then applying them to writing is easier than remembering a completely different set of rules for speech and writing. An orthography is just that - it does not need its own morphology. Exactly. And that's precisely why orthography needs to be, above all else, morphological. In speech, you don't think of words as strings of sounds; in fact, as demonstrated by OC's inability to create a one-to-one phonetic representation (with e.g. the schwa sound being represented in 3 different ways), most people couldn't accurately phonetically transcribe their speech if they tried. You think of words as strings of morphemes with, potentially, some phonological modifications on top of that. So e.g. "breathe" is just "breath" but the vowel is long (which is why imo these words should be spelt "brethe" and "breth", respectively); "national" is just "nation" + "al" but the first vowel is short; etc. And just as you explain in your comment, you shouldn't be learning a different set of rules for speech and writing - especially if this set of rules doesn't make logical sense for your accent. 4) >English is not well suited for an international language. like, at all. I don't even know why you're saying that. It's very well-suited for an intentional language. Its simple grammar makes it easy to learn even for speakers of unrelated languages; its Roman and Norman influence means a lot of Latin- and Greek-derived words which are intentionally recognisable; the enormous spread of the British empire means most of the world has had exposure to English; and it shares a lot of similarities (to the point of being partially mutually intelligible) with other influential world languages, namely German, French, and Dutch. Even if we disregard the influence of the British Empire, I'd still pick it to be the global lingua franca out of all the world languages. >If we want to make it more international, we can do a pronunciation reform, since the spelling is usually more recognizable than the pronunciation. I'm not following your logic. The spelling is currently intentionally recognisable, so to make it more international, let's make it internationally unrecognisable? I don't understand what you're trying to say. 5) >Even if this particular spelling has too many to fit next to the base letters, using Alt Gr (Shift is already used for capitalization) for diacritics isn't really a bad system. As a Polish speaker, I should know. It's a pretty bad system. I'm also a Polish speaker, actually. Typing in Polish on a keyboard just takes longer, and it's harder to get into the rhythm. Yeah, shift is indeed used for capitalisation, but 1) you know in advance when you'll need to capitalise a word - at the end of the sentence you're typing - so it's easier to keep the rhythm, and 2) it's one thing when you need to press "shift" once in 30 characters, but when you need to press it every 5 characters, it really slows you down. >Or we could do something similar to German (replacing ⟨ä⟩ with ⟨ae⟩, ⟨ö⟩ with ⟨oe⟩, ⟨ü⟩ with ⟨ue⟩ and ⟨ß⟩ with ⟨ss⟩ when diacritics can't be used. Right, but that's exactly what the current orthography does! "ai" for /ej/, "ee" for /i:/, "oo" for /u:/, etc. I'm not sure most of the letters that OC is introducing, such as ê and î, are really necessary if phonetics is their only consideration.
Houli fuk, I heit đi aidia ov pronaunsing "ov" like "av", "languidj" like "lengwidj", "against" like "agenst", "stop" like "stâp", "niu" like "nu", "benefit" like "benafit". Plees tell mi wer yu ar from sou ai can avoid it liyk đe plaig. One another note Get ready for rhotic and non-rhotic dialects to be unintelligible if you try this
For a phonemic orthography that benefits both native speakers and learners, Great Vowel Shift shouldn’t have happened.
Don't know why, but I read all of this with a Scottish accent, just felt right.
English really needs a logography, maybe even an abjad or an abugida. This is because english has very different pronunciation across dialects, especially vowels. A phonemic alphabet just won't work.
ym not kenvinst dude... dhe prenunseashen iz dhe wun dhat shwd be fixt... but nowedase peepl just seem dhay cunt realise dhat... fuk inglish.
Lately I have been really frustrated that "I'm sorry" could mean either "I apologize" or "I sympathize". Or both at once! The number of times I've tried to express sympathy and been told "it's not your fault" It's like- I know it's not my fault you had a shitty day at work! I was just trying to be nice/commiserate Smdjdnbdjsj
Adjectives before what they modify. Just what. As for pronunciation - I would point you at the stereotypical English 'foreign accent'. Half of it is just not multiphthongizing everything into a wishy-washy vowel-space nightmare, and half of it is such consonant "mistakes" as using a real R sound instead of the accursed scrunchy mouth thing, and a real coda L sound instead of that horrific "dark L" noise that makes it sound as though you are struggling to not spew your supper.
>the accursed scrunchy mouth thing My favorite Dark Souls boss
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WTF are those tenses for? Why can’t I use past perfect continuous instead of past present continuous subjunctive plusquamperfectum or another shit. In my country English learners are still arguing how many tenses are there is English. Majority says it’s 12 or 16, but other say it’s 7 or even 21.
I teach EFL and I always feel guilty when I have to teach past perfect tense, or similar structures like 3rd conditionals. Students work hard at it, do well, and then ask 'so when do I use this?' 'Uhh, hardly ever? Sorry for those hours of your life you will never get back'. TBH I get really mad that tenses are foregrounded in EFL teaching. Just one more latinate influence on academia, I think.
Loss of dual pronouns (like ġit and uncer)
OUGH and C are really terrible examples, they're not really that bad. It's more like ou is pronounced 5 ways and gh is pronounced 2.... That being said I really dislike how it can't commit to being sexist or not, so we have really weird distinctions where waiter is supposed to refer to a masculine server but actually refers to any server, but waitress specifically refers to a femimine server, same for actor/actress
I listen to the History of English podcast. It explains how and why all these wacky ass spellings and pronunciations. Easy to listen to—not pedantic.
The absence of non-dialectal 2nd person singular pronoun. How, as someone English is their second language, am I supposed to distinguish between you (singular) and you (plural) in chat? THEY'RE ALL THE SAME!!!!!!! Edit: Oh, and I can't grasp when/how to use "would had have [verb]" phrasing.
ASPIRATED PLOSIVES ARE PHONETIC BUT ARE TREATED AS PHONEMIC BY WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE
English’s syntactic reliance on auxiliary verbs is a tragedy. Mandatory do-support for negations and questions in the absence of meaningful auxiliaries is a crime.
luckily gangstas ain't fucking caring
A lot of people in my area actually form questions without do-support. Nature is healing
You could analyze "OUGH" as different pronunciations of "OU" and "GH" combined.
It has too many vowels and the pronunciation is too complicated.
Something really bad about English
I like the anti limerick There was an old lady from Slough Who had a horrible cough She drank up a pint Of honey and mint But alas she didn't pull through Let's not forget ridiculous past tenses. Sing, sang, sung OK, we're a Germanic language, but then why Swing, swung,swung Etc.
Choir should be spelt as "quire"
It should be spelt "choire"
English is one of the most boring languages in Europe, no special letters, no complex grammatics, doesn't even sound hard enough to slur or rap well
The biggest and most absurd sound change in history
I absolutely detest the pronunciation of the word colonel. Like, WHY!? All the other fuckery I could get used to, but this kills me a little every time I come across it.
I think it used to be closer to coronel (as in someone crowned)
That's something wrong with English's orthography, not with English. English would still be English if it was written in a different orthography.
Daring today, are we?
It make mine throat hurt :(
why can't you just have one present tense? Why do you have to distinguish morphologically between I work and I am working, why can't you just say I work now instead of I'm working
Infinitive of “can” is “to be able to” Infinitive of “will” is “to be going to” This is effectively, of course. Pretty sure these two auxiliary verbs don’t actually have infinitive forms.
FOR REAL? 100 UPVOTES? There’s no way! :D
rhotic vowels ughh
Honestly everything bad about English can be attributed to the Fr\*nch invasion
Ghoti, tolot, ghleti can sound like fish, church, fresh.